Author Archive

Wow. Great shot. Talk about moody. Source: Newshub Features on Twitter. I’ve recently been thinking (again) about how media organizations harvest people-in-the-news’s social media profiles – often without permission and often murky about attribution – Source: “supplied” or “Facebook”. I hope I don’t sound too much like a hypocrite because I do use pix “published” on […]

Watch this video. It’s short, less than 5 min, but it’s very good. The ‘flack’ filter — attempts to attack, invalidate and delegitimize “inconvenient” media narratives (starting about 3′ 30″ in the video) — was clearly on display in the NZ Government and NZ Defence Force spin response to Nicky Hager & Jon Stephenson’s book […]

Record defamation damages winner (oops, then loser) Jordan Williams has announced he’s going to appeal the ruling striking out the damages bonanza a jury awarded him last year. As we saw previously (See: ‘About that Jordan Williams damages award…‘), the judge presiding over the defamation action Williams took against Colin Craig struck out the jury’s verdict […]

I had an ‘incomplete’ feeling about that jury award in the Colin Craig/Jordan Williams defamation case – the ‘record’ amount of damages totalling $1.27M awarded in September 2016. It seemed to me there was a step outstanding: It hadn’t been confirmed by the judge in the case. So every now and then I asked a few people, […]

Possibly they were celebrating the fact that it wasn’t either of them who was involved in an excruciating 16 minute interview on Morning Report trying to sell a bill of goods to Kim Hill like Anne Tolley was this morning. Oh dear me. Plumbing ridiculous depths, Mrs Tolley – the Minister for Social Development – […]

Where did this brave young woman have to get to? How low did she need to go, to come back with such courage? I’m so impressed with how she comes clean and asks for support as she admits and challenges the grip of a powerful addiction and affliction. I don’t know her or anything about […]

I had enormous admiration for this giant, and also gratitude for the influence of his music – his soul music – his meditations and his anthems in my life. Words, many more words, will be written and spoken about Leonard Cohen, and so they should. But not by me here today. I have so much […]

Well, this is a development … Look at Newt Gingrich’s worldview. Trying to paint Fox News as ‘part of the establishment’ seems ludicrous, and even Kelly laughed that off. She did very well as he spun out. But that was a terrible putdown of him at the end re working on his ‘anger issues’. Judging […]

I like virtually everything this young artist delivers, as we have discussed. I could even see the (cough) good side of her ‘More than a bum’ soft sell video mockumentary ad for Wrangler jeans. Here’s her latest …

The Republican candidate and his campaign are, once again launching attacks, insults and are attempting to revive slanders and false accusations about my life, in order to humiliate, intimidate, and unbalance me. These attacks are cheap lies with bad intentions. This, of course, is not the first time the candidate insists on discrediting someone or […]

The end of the beginning of the legal pissing contest between dark arts ‘Taxpayers Union’ propagandist and lobbyist Jordan Williams and idiot neophyte politician Colin Craig was reached on Friday. The jury in the messy defamation case Williams took against Craig (in part, he said, to pre-empt threatened action by Craig) delivered a ‘record win’ […]

A celebrity ‘Get Out The Vote’ ad with a difference. This 2016 US presidential election is “a tipping point.” Hard to argue with that. Nor with the description of Donald Trump as “a racist abusive coward”. See what you think.

This is another very good, clear explanation of some of the issues around government-sanctioned, usually secret interference with the internet. Well worth watching. In justifications for these ‘interferences‘ (that’s the legal term) with our privacy and other human rights – like freedom of opinion and expression – much is made of the ‘threats’ that we […]

This afternoon the whistleblower who fed Nicky Hager much of the material which formed the basis of Hager’s book Dirty Politics broke his/her self-imposed silence to shed some more light on the activities of Jordan Williams. Currently Jordan Williams is defending his reputation by suing Colin Craig for [allegedly] defamatory remarks Craig made about Williams. The twitter […]